The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  After she left, Bosch got down to business. He made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, stacked the Bonnie Brae murder books on the dining-room table, and put on a Ron Carter disc he hadn’t listened to in a while. It was called Dear Miles and Bosch assumed that the 2007 recording was inspired by the bassist’s time in the Miles Davis band of the 1960s. Bosch hadn’t chosen it for the origin or the Davis standards it contained. He was looking for rhythm, and Carter’s vibrant bass line leading the quartet would certainly bring it. He needed to get through the Bonnie Brae material on this night and then move on and back to the Merced case with an undeniable momentum. Ron Carter would help with that.

  He picked up where he had left off. He pulled out the stack of newspaper articles, but this time, unfettered by the tight confines of an airline seat, he spread the stories he had read across the large rectangular tabletop in hope that the display of all the photos and headlines might shake something loose. An idea or maybe a detail of a photo he had missed or a word from a headline that would inspire an unseen connection.

  He was still on the first day of coverage, reading the stories from inside the A section of the Times. The track “Seven Steps to Heaven” helped him pick up the pace and soon half his sandwich was gone and he had moved on to the first day’s stories in the B section. These stories focused on the human element of the tragedy. There were short descriptions of the young victims who perished and a larger profile of Esther “Esi” Gonzalez, the day-care center teacher who died trying to protect the children from the smoke and flames. One photo dated a year before the fire showed the woman hugging a child in the day-care center. The accompanying story seemed to counter the front-page article that castigated the proliferation of unlicensed day-care centers in the city by describing this woman as a trusted caretaker of children who sacrificed herself in an attempt to save them. It was Bosch’s thought that the reporters who had written the stories had not compared notes. One wrote about a tragic flaw in the system and one wrote about a hero who emerged from that system. He thought that maybe this was the newspaper’s attempt to provide balanced coverage.

  The story jumped to the next page, but Bosch could not find the clip in the remaining stack of crumbling newsprint. Then he flipped over the front page of the B section he had been reading and found the continuation on the back of it. It fit perfectly within the cutting.

  He finished the story and felt a new urgency about solving the case. The loss of the children was the awful tragedy, to be sure. But it was Esi Gonzalez’s full profile that brought home to Bosch the horror of the crime.

  He flipped the clip over to study the photo of the woman again and then reread the story. When he turned it to read the continuation, another story caught his eye. It was unrelated to the Bonnie Brae fire. It was a column containing police briefs. The first one drew his attention.

  Armed Robbers Hit Mid-City Check Casher

  Two heavily armed and masked men stormed into a Wilshire Boulevard check-cashing company Friday and brutalized employees before escaping with the business’s cash reserves, Los Angeles Police said.

  The daring morning robbery occurred at EZBank, at the corner of the busy intersection of Wilshire and Burlington Boulevards. LAPD detective Augustus Braley said the robbers arrived at 10:30 a.m. in a dark sedan. Both gunmen left the car with its doors open and entered the premises of the check-cashing company.

  Braley, of the Major Crimes Unit, said the robbers wore ski masks but fired their weapons at cameras inside the business, disabling them. It was believed based on witness descriptions that they were carrying AR-15 assault rifles. The robbers moved so quickly they surprised a security guard who was in the lobby of the business. One suspect struck the security guard repeatedly with the butt end of his weapon until he was knocked to the floor. One of the armed men then pointed a gun at the guard’s head and threatened to kill him if other employees did not open a locked steel door and allow them behind the bulletproof, glass-enclosed counter. Once behind the counter, the gunmen forced two employees to empty a safe and three cash drawers of an undisclosed amount of money. The robbers then ran from the premises and fled in the getaway car.

  Braley said that employees of the business had engaged a silent alarm when the robbers first entered the premises but the robbery occurred so quickly that the suspects were gone by the time police responded.

  Investigators were looking into the possibility that the robbery was linked to others in Los Angeles in recent months. Two men brandishing similar weapons and wearing ski masks robbed a check-cashing store in Paramount six weeks ago. Braley would not say whether that robbery was suspected of being linked to Friday’s crime.

  The security guard, who was not identified by police, was treated by paramedics at the scene.

  —Joel Bremmer, Times Staff Writer

  Bosch read the story again. He realized that the fire call and the robbery occurred within fifteen minutes of each other on Friday, October 1, 1993.

  “Mother’s Day,” Bosch said to himself.

  He got up and went to a wall of shelves in the living room. These mostly held his records, CDs, and some of the DVDs his daughter had collected over the years. But there was an old Thomas Brothers map book of Los Angeles that had probably logged a couple hundred thousand miles in Bosch’s cars over the years. He now had an updated map book in his car but also relied on his partners for GPS-generated directions whenever he needed them.

  He took the map book over to the table and flipped through the pages until he found the one that included the Pico-Union area of the city and the start of the Wilshire corridor that led all the way to the Pacific. With a pencil he marked the location of the Bonnie Brae fire, between 7th and 8th Streets, and then the location of the EZBank robbery at Wilshire and Burlington. As he suspected, the two locations were close. The robbery occurred two and a half blocks north and one block west of the Bonnie Brae Arms. The distance could have been driven in less than two minutes.

  Bosch sat back and studied the map and thought about the possibilities. “Mother’s Day” was street slang for the day that government subsistence checks landed in mailboxes, usually the first of every month. The nickname came about because street hoods often came home to visit mother on the day she got her government check.

  Street slang aside, Bosch knew that businesses like EZBank would fill their safes and cash drawers to be ready to handle the regular increase of check cashing that occurred on or near Mother’s Day. The Times story did not say how much money was stolen in the robbery but Bosch knew that for the Major Crimes Unit to have taken on the case, it would have to have been six figures.

  He knew of Gus Braley back in the nineties but had never worked with him. Major Crimes as it was then didn’t even exist anymore and he was pretty sure Braley had retired before the turn of the century.

  Bosch muted the music, then pulled his phone out and scrolled through his contact list. There was only one guy he knew who was in Major Crimes back then, the recently retired Rick Jackson. He had Jackson’s cell number and hoped he hadn’t changed it—he knew many cops did when they pulled the pin. He called the number and Jackson answered after two rings.

  “This is Rick.”

  “This is Harry Bosch. You still remember me?”

  Jackson laughed.

  “Whassup, my brother?” he asked.

  Now Bosch laughed.

  “How long ago did you retire? The nineties? If I said something like that in front of my partner, she’d think I just came out of a time machine.”

  “Gotta love the nineties, Harry. What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? I’m working on a Saturday night and I’m sitting here wondering if you knew Gus Braley back in the day.”

  “Sure did. Old Gus—he was a son of a bitch. Tough guy.”

  “Still alive?”

  “Oh, yeah. I joined this retired detectives group and we meet once a month for lunch. I don’t go every time but I’ve seen him there. I think he comes in from P
alm Springs. What’s going on with him?”

  “I’m looking at one of his old cases and want to ask him about it. You got a number that’s good for him?”

  “Yeah, hold on. I gotta look at my contacts on my phone to get it. I’ll read it out loud then bring the phone back up, okay?”

  “Okay. Whatever happened to the Rolodex?”

  “Really.”

  Bosch waited while Jackson looked through his contacts list and then called the number out loudly. Bosch wrote it down on the edge of the Pico-Union map page.

  “Got it?” Jackson asked with the phone back to his mouth.

  “Got it,” Bosch said. “Thanks. So how are you hitting ’em?”

  Bosch knew very little about golf but knew that was a question often asked.

  “Pretty good,” Jackson said. “Playing a lot and practice makes . . . well, almost perfect. I’m down to single digits.”

  Bosch had no idea what that meant so he didn’t know what to say.

  “You miss us?” he asked, going in a new direction. “You miss the work?”

  “Not yet. And I don’t think I will. How long you got left, Harry?”

  “I don’t know. A little over a year, I think. I try not to think about it.”

  “You ought to take up golf, man. I’ll take you out someday.”

  “Yeah, golf. I’ll let you know.”

  Bosch couldn’t picture it, especially the shorts he’d seen golfers wearing. He didn’t own any shorts.

  “So,” he said, changing the subject. “We hooked up with your guy Ricky Childers in Tulsa. Good guy and he sent his regards.”

  “The book!” Jackson exclaimed. “The book comes through. You guys get a slice of pie while you were in town?”

  “No, no time for pie.”

  “Anyway, I’m telling you, they should sell that book to a publisher. Just don’t forget about me with the royalties.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get a piece of the pie.”

  Both men laughed. Bosch then thanked Jackson and promised to stay in touch. After disconnecting, Bosch immediately called the number Jackson had given him.

  Braley didn’t answer and the call went to a message. Bosch left his name and number and said he needed to talk to him about a case Braley had handled in 1993. He then gave his number again and disconnected.

  He picked up the pencil and drummed it on the table. This review was not going the way he thought it would. He had something here. The case had a loose tooth and he couldn’t leave it alone. He hoped he would hear from Braley soon.

  He turned the music back up in time to hear “Stella by Starlight” and returned to the work in front of him. He quickly finished reading through the newspaper stories. After the first ten days of multiple stories daily, the coverage waned and became little more than perfunctory updates on an investigation going nowhere. He then started through the other murder books, quickly reviewing the autopsies and photos of the dead children and the two adults. The photos were as hideous as they were sadly repetitive, but Bosch knew he couldn’t look away. He thought of the names tattooed on Lucy Soto’s arm and affixed them to children in the photographs. He would not need a tattoo to remember them.

  An hour further into the review, Bosch tried calling Braley again, knowing full well that he had left a message and the retired detective would call when he received it. But he was surprised that the call was answered.

  “Yes?”

  Bosch muted the music with his remote again.

  “Gus? Gus Braley?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  “It’s Harry Bosch. At Robbery-Homicide? I left you a message a little while ago today.”

  “I got it, yeah.”

  Bosch paused.

  “Well, were you going to call me back?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I was going to call. I was just sitting here thinking about ’93 and wondering what case you were calling about. That was a busy year.”

  “The EZBank job over on Wilshire. You remember it?”

  “EZBank . . . yeah, I remember it. Mother’s Day. Two guys with AR-15s.”

  “That’s it. I’m working from home tonight, no access to the company computer and trying to catch up. Did you ever pop anybody for it?”

  There was a pause.

  “Bosch. I remember you. You’re a murder cop, right? What do you care about a cash-box robbery from twenty-one years ago?”

  “You’re right, I’m a murder cop. I work cold cases now, and I’m looking at a case that I’m thinking maybe your guys could be good for. So did you ever make arrests, Gus? Name any suspects?”

  There were a few seconds of silence while Braley was grinding it down.

  “How’d you get this number, seeing that you’re working from home on a Saturday night?”

  “Rick Jackson. Call him if you want. He’ll tell you I’m good people.”

  “I don’t know, man. Saturday night, you gotta admit this is a little hinky. Who works Saturday nights in cold cases?”

  Braley still used cop-speak from the nineties.

  “Hinky or not, Rick will vouch for me. Can you help me, Gus?”

  Bosch waited. He knew that the chances of his being able to pull either a digital or hard-copy file on a twenty-one-year-old robbery were not good. The statute of limitations would be long past on a robbery and it was unlikely the Department would have kept a physical file. Only cases with viable prosecutorial status were scanned and entered when the Department went through a massive shift-and-purge process as it moved toward digitized records. Bosch needed Braley to help him.

  “That one we never cleared,” Braley finally said.

  “How much do you remember about it?” Bosch asked.

  “I bet you remember the ones you never solved, right? Yeah, well, me, too. Fuckin’ A, I do. I worked stickups and you work murders but the open cases still stay with you.”

  “They sure do. How much did they get in the robbery?”

  “I remember that to the dime. Two-hundred sixty-six thousand, three hundred dollars.”

  Bosch whistled low.

  “You’re kidding me. In that neighborhood?”

  “On Mother’s Day they’d cash three, four hundred checks. That adds up.”

  “And these guys with the AR-15s knew that.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure it out, but we thought they probably had help from somebody inside. We just could never confirm it. Our pick for the inside man lawyered up faster than you can say, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ ”

  “The security guard?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I don’t know. Something about the way it read in the paper.”

  “I thought you didn’t have the file.”

  “I don’t. It’s a long story, Gus, but all I have is a first-day newspaper clip, and after reading it I was thinking that if I was going to lean on anybody inside, it would be the security guard. Do you remember his name?”

  “Nope. Rodney something or other—that’s all I remember. He was white American and the two stickup guys were white and the one who did the talking had no accent. This Rodney character was also banging the girl behind the cage on the side. We found that out. And she was the one who opened the door for them.”

  “Did you think she was in on it, too?”

  “No, because she was the one who pulled the silent alarm before they made her open up. As soon as she saw guys in ski masks getting out of the car in front, she pulled the alarm. That put her in the clear in our book. But we grilled her pretty good anyway and dismissed her as being part of it. She just opened the gate because they had a gun to her boyfriend’s head. So we zeroed in on him, thinking maybe he played her. He knew she’d open the door when she saw him all beat up and with the gun to his head. But nothing came of it. Maybe Rodney set it up, maybe he didn’t.”

  “No other suspects came up?”

  “Not right then. But when those two guys shot up North Hollywood on national TV a
few years later, we took a look at them. They were white and worked as a pair, used ski masks, and carried AR-15s.”

  Braley was referencing the infamous 1997 shoot-out in the streets outside a Bank of America branch in North Hollywood. Two heavily armed and armored men engaged with police for nearly an hour in what was the most violent firefight with law enforcement ever seen on American soil. It was carried live on TV around the world. When it was over, three thousand rounds had been fired, eighteen cops and citizens were left shot and injured, and the two gunmen were finally dead. The bloody afternoon was analyzed in detail with every subsequent class of recruits that came through the Police Academy. And it was responsible for upgrades in the types and power of weapons LAPD officers were allowed to carry on their persons and in their work cars. On that day, it seemed as though the entire police force had been outgunned by the two bank robbers.

  Bosch had been there. The ongoing shooting drew hundreds of officers and detectives from all over the city. Bosch and his partner at the time, Jerry Edgar, had responded code three from Hollywood Station and arrived at the barricade on Laurel Canyon Boulevard just as the final shots were fired and the all-clear signal was given. They were then assigned to crime scene containment and the massive post-shooting investigation.

  “What happened with that?” Bosch asked.

  “We never made the connection,” Braley said. “But not for lack of trying. Let me tell you a story about those two guys. Back in October ’93—just a few weeks after the EZBank job—those two guys got arrested up in Glendale. They were pulled over on a simple traffic stop for suspicious activity around a bank, and the copper saw guns under a blanket on the backseat. They had a friggin’ arsenal in the car—including two AR-15s—and they were about to hit the bank. They made an attempted robbery case against them and both went to prison for a couple years.”